![whiz kid whiz kid](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2BEHH0N/background-template-design-with-happy-children-and-word-whiz-kid-illustration-2BEHH0N.jpg)
Personnel were already aware of the need for them they just hadn’t found a way to institutionalize better accountability in decision making. Tex didn’t invent statistical methods and the Air Force and its The way he showed no awe of authority.” Lovett said. Lovett and Tex shared a desire to bring factsĪnd statistical rigor to the disorganized military and Tex impressed Lovett with his confidence and ambition. Secretary of War, asked a mutual friend to introduce them. Housing was circulated among government departments as a model of succinct analysis and having seen it, Robert Lovett, the Assistant New Deal agencies taking undergraduate classes at night to earn his bachelor’s degree in business. Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean, Charles “Tex” Thornton was a lowly 26-year old statistician in one of FDR’s The middle of the enemy’s capitol at the start of the greatest war of the 20th century without even knowing it! He would later joke that a future Secretary of Defense was in You know there’s a war on?” he was asked. He stopped at a train station in Berlin and asked for a ticket to Italy. On one side of the Atlantic in 1939, Robert McNamara was celebrating his Harvard MBA graduation by backpacking aroundĮurope when Hitler invaded Poland. They broughtĪnalytical discipline to the military and American business that desperately needed it, but they inadvertantly swung the pendulum too The Whiz Kids’ doctrine is also arguably responsible for America’sĬontinued involvement in the Vietnam War after 1965 which led to the vast majority of the war’s 58,209 US casualtiesĪnd the millions of Vietnamese military and civilian deaths. Invasion from which the Big 3 have yet to recover. Would ultimately cause the drop in quality and innovativeness of American cars, opening the door to the Japanese Perhaps it’s a hyperbole to say that they saved and then almost destroyed the US.
![whiz kid whiz kid](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/dZ4AAOSwl69fT6TY/s-l300.jpg)
Question on independent occassions: “How many copies do you anticipate selling?” Tex and McNamara about writing Tex’s biography, both of them asked exactly the same single numerical Quantified and deliberately ignoring everything else. They found power and comfort in assigning values to what could be The Whiz Kids invented a world where all decisions could be made based on numbers - an ideal that is still skirted onīy many MBA programs and consulting firms today. Edward Lundy,Īrjay Miller, and the others - that I didn’t want to forget their story and the lessons to be learned from them.